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Why didn't Britain win the race to the Moon?

The British space effort has been quiet in its successes. Space industries in the UK have a £6.5 billion annual turnover, employ 68,000 people and, even in these times of recession, are expected to grow at a rate of 5 per cent each year until 2020, according to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. In fact, the department makes the bold claim that the UK is now second only to the USA in the space science sector.

What Britain's space programme lacks is glamour &ndash; it has never put a man on the Moon, or anywhere near it.

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At one stage, that wasn't such an unlikely-sounding idea. After pioneering the use of jet engines during the Second World War, Britain built the first commercial passenger jet, the DeHavilland Comet, which briefly established Britain as the world's foremost aircraft maker. The UK was also a leader in rocket development outside of the US and USSR, says Doug Millard, senior curator of the Science Museum's space department, in his overview of the country's space missions (downloadable PDF).

In 1955, British scientists had started to develop the Blue Streak intermediate-range ballistic missile, which had a range of about 2,500 miles. It was tested successfully, but in postwar Britain the mounting costs of the programme could not be justified and it was abandoned as a weapons system when the UK turned to the American Skybolt system.

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The Blue Streak eventually found a role as the first stage of the Europa satellite launch vehicle, a rocket built in collaboration with several other European countries. The UK continued to work independently, launching the Skylark rocket in 1957, but it too would soon be incorporated into the European space programme. The future of British space exploration was to be as the partner of larger, better funded organisations.

When Sputnik shocked the US into a space race with the Soviet Union, British scientists were soon working alongside the Americans. In 1962, a US Thor-Delta rocket launched Ariel 1 (also known as UK-1), the first spacecraft to contain UK technology and the world’s first international satellite. "Ariel 1 was built by Nasa, but contained seven scientific experiments devised and constructed by UK universities and industry," Millard says. This was the first of five Ariel satellites.

As work on satellites continued, Britain surprised partners by withdrawing from efforts to build a European spacecraft in June 1966, blaming spiralling costs. This move, says Millard "signalled the UK’s exit from any further substantive development of space launch vehicles".

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Even so, British scientists continued to play a key role in the development of satellites. The US offered massive opportunities for advanced minds, and scientists from the UK were among those who joined Nasa and became integral to its success. Francis Thomas Bacon, for example, developed the fuel cells used on Apollo 11, and was later lauded by Richard Nixon. According to space lore, the President put his arm around the Englishman's shoulders and told him: "Without you, Tom, we wouldn't have gotten to the Moon."

As Neil Armstrong was walking on the Moon, Mariner 9 was orbiting Mars and three American astronauts lived in the Skylab space station for 85 days, British efforts in space were less attention-grabbing. A government veto on human space exploration cut off funding for manned missions, but Ken Pounds, professor of space physics at the University of Leicester, says important work was accomplished. "The problem is most people just associate space exploration with humans in space but this is a relatively small part of the work that goes on," he says.

Abandoning rockets and manned spacecraft, the UK focused instead on satellites, an industry which continues to flourish. As well as the space design and build facility of EADS Astrium, the UK is home to Surrey Satellite Technology and IMMARSAT, the biggest satellite operator in the world, whose products cover 85 per cent of the globe. "UK space exploration affects us in ways that we don’t even recognise, from getting TV pictures from around the world to having cheap mobile calls to GPS to sat nav," Pounds says. "I would only notice how much we gain from it if the satellites were knocked off by a giant solar flare."

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To date, the UK has launched about 20 satellites into space and had only two failures, including the well-publicised Beagle 2 debacle. This British-built Mars probe failed to make contact on Christmas Day, 2003, after crash-landing on the surface of the planet. Two years later, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon, Titan and continued to send data for 90 minutes &ndash; an achievement that didn’t receive the same level of coverage as the failed Beagle mission. "The UK’s achievement is immense if you consider the size of our nation," says Jeremy Curtis, who works for both the British National Space Centre and the Science and Technology Facilities Council. As well as the probes and satellites, he points to other space-related technologies. The first infra-red map of the universe, for example, or the Galileo satellite system, which could provide an alternative to the US GPS system. Even now, British scientists are studying "the geochemistry of the Moon in unprecedented detail" thanks to a British X-ray spectrometer on board an Indian satellite.

Curtis admits, however, that glamour is important. "It is inevitable that ordinary people are more interested with the human achievements," he says.

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We may not have to wait too much longer. Tim Peake, a Briton, is now training to go into space with the European Space Agency, which opened its first UK base last month. And, in an interview with Wired.co.uk, Science Minister Lord Drayson suggested that the UK may soon create its own space agency and lift the veto on manned space missions. "We need to get the next generation excited about the idea of missions to Mars, as one of the people who might go from this country is probably a teenager today," he said. "We should keep a focus of the areas that we are good at &ndash; building satellites, space science, building probes etc &ndash; but also consider the probability of a British person going to Mars."

Pounds believes that humans will be heading back to the Moon in the next 15 to 20 years, and says that the UK must be involved. There will, of course, be an element of competition among nations, he says. "The US won’t sit back, for example, and let the Chinese achieve it before them, but the mission from the Moon to Mars could also bring nations together. It is a major enterprise for the human race." The UK, he says, should be a part of it.

Chris Riley, who directed In the Shadow of the Moon, produced Moonwalk One and wrote the Haynes Apollo 11 "owner's manual", argues that the Moon landings marked a high point of international ambition that ought to be revived. “Everybody was devoted to it in a way that doesn’t happen anymore," he says. "The rewards from Apollo are immense and there’s not one person in the world it hasn’t benefited. The thing about the Apollo mission is that the people at Nasa did it for all mankind. Their achievements transcend national sensibility. It was just a great human achievement.”

David Williams, director general of the British National Space Centre and the "voice of space" in the UK Government, agrees that we can expect more collaboration in future missions. “Manned space is becoming more and more a global mission," he says. "It is not a competition but an exploratory endeavour. Each country will simply choose the role it wants to take.”